Brooke Alexander

Yvonne Jacquette is the kind of realist who, as Constable said of Ruysdael, communicates an understanding of what she paints. Painting everyday life as seen from above, she follows realism’s way of intensifying the seemingly casual visual perception so that its deeper necessity stands revealed. Her understanding admits the tangled nature of her subject: a separate view on the world every time, within reach of melancholy but spared the more topical forms of fuss. She has made the luxurious airborne overview her specialty without dramatizing its alien’s-eye peculiarity. Architecture, streets, traffic, topography, and—where the view is telescoped—people on the go are distinguished first for themselves, each in character rather than serving an abstract conception about how things do or don’t fit. Thus the larger abstraction—the surface-wide image as a whole—emanates from the pressures of vivid